


These Bricks and Beams

by fluffernutter8



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Steggy Week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 16:23:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19872544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: On the house hunt. Frustratingly.





	These Bricks and Beams

Peggy has a plan. She does for most things, after all, and buying her first house as a newlywed is no exception. She and Steve have stayed in the familiar flat they love several months past its being strictly comfortable. It’s always been a small place, and it was already becoming cramped with two of them living there. Steve’s clothes hang in the front closet because the bedroom wardrobe is too small for them to share, and now they’re stepping around wedding gifts when they just want to make some toast in the morning.

So one Monday Peggy puts the plan into motion, calling up a Realtor and requesting that they be shown some scaled up residential properties on the market. She and Steve have agreed on their basic qualifications for size, location, price range, and amenities, and Hank Farmer ( _Number 1 seller three years running!_ \- according to whom, she wonders) gives her every indication that he’ll be able to find some good options for them to see by next week.

Farmer is just as toothily smiling in person as he sounds over the phone. She and Steve exchange a look, but he does come highly recommended (Steve had actually called the local Realtors Bureau, and apparently it is they who keep statistics on who has sold the most in the area) so they push onward, schooling their faces into welcoming blankness.

They see four properties on the first day, flats larger than their current one but with prices that push at the upper boundary of their budget and perhaps even overflow. Steve widens his eyes and shakes his head behind Hank's back when he tells them how much the third floor walkup costs, and she isn't entirely certain the serum will protect her husband from giving himself a stroke at the thought of writing the monthly rent check.

Hank shows them some houses at their next outing, which do have the advantage of price and space, although she'll have a slightly longer commute.

"These units are just sprouting up like weeds," Hank enthuses as they walk through their third such identical house. "Got plenty of young couples set up in ones just like this, and they love them! All the latest: garage for the tinkering gentleman, fresh new linoleum and appliances for the missus." No matter how many times they've mentioned that Steve plans to stay home, Hank refuses to actually absorb the information, handling his discomfort over the arrangement by ignoring it completely and carrying on as if they haven't said anything at all.

His information is accurate, at least. "I think the first kitchen is a bit bigger, and the fourth had lovely exposure if you'd actually like to start that garden, but they all seem in order and they tick the boxes that we'd discussed," Peggy says on the way home.

Steve makes a little sound of acknowledgement, although it's so absent that it almost sounds like one of his sleeping noises. He doesn't speak for a while, and when he says, "I'm not sure that I could see us in any of them. Maybe we should keep looking," he sounds oddly tentative.

She looks over at him in the dim light. She doesn’t know what the purpose would be exactly, but she loves her husband and he has good judgment in his own way. "Certainly we can," she agrees readily.

A month later she is regretting her easy acquiescence. They have gone out with Hank Farmer twice more and seen a dozen other options in the growing suburban communities surrounding the city, and Steve has nodded through each tour, shaken Hank's hand politely, and on the way home said that he couldn't picture them in any of them. Finally Hank told them that perhaps they needed a break to recalculate what they were looking for, and even he looked exhausted, his smile just about ready to melt off his face.

Peggy tells herself that it's fine. She has a backup plan, too, and each morning she and Steve sit in their kitchen which seems increasingly tiny and circle likely listings in the paper. Once a week, they go see them in person. The novelty of shopping for such a major purchase, of getting to see inside all different homes, has long worn off for Peggy. On the way up each front walk, she thrusts her purse over her shoulder with a grimness once reserved for warfare.

And yet Steve continues to reject each house with equally flimsy logic each time: the front door of this one opened right into the kitchen, their current furniture wouldn't coordinate well with the wallpaper in that one. Once or twice, Peggy wonders dully whether he is tormenting her on purpose for some reason, but of course that’s not his nature and, anyway, he is too open for such deception. His face would show any such ridiculous thing in an instant.

Finally one Saturday morning he brings the newspaper over and starts to open it to the classified section and she snaps.

"I don't expect to find anything promising in there," she tells him tartly, buttering her toast so violently she wonders if the bread will be entirely crumbs before she is done. "We've likely seen all that's on offer at least once before, and if we haven't, you'll no doubt discount any new options with ever more minor explanations. Tell me, is there a particular reason that we haven't seen a single property where you can apparently imagine us living?"

"I know," he says, his voice softly miserable. He folds the paper and sets it on the table with that care that she admires and loves so much. She softens a bit despite herself.

"Can you at least try to explain it to me?" she asks, but he shakes his head.

"I can't even explain it to myself. All those places we've seen, they look fine. They all look nearly the same, as a matter of fact - I’m sure I'm just torturing you, making you go tour each one when if you've seen one you've seen them all. But I don't know, Peg. They just don't feel like our house." He steps away from her, sliding his hands into his pockets. "I'm going to take a walk, okay?"

He is gone for so long that she is called into the office before seeing him again. She's distracted all day, her thoughts returning to him at each open moment, always an undercurrent of wondering and worrying even as she takes care of the problems that she can.

He's made shepherd's pie, she realizes as she returns home that evening, and she softens toward him even more. She'd only mentioned once that she used to beg her mother for it at every occasion and she still considers it such a comforting dish.

He kisses her gently as she comes into the kitchen and dishes her out a portion. She starts in on it immediately - apparently worrying over one's husband builds an appetite - and it is a minute before she realizes that his still remains untouched.

Swallowing, she asks, "Did your walk help?"

"It did." He looks down at the table and then back up at her again. "I hate all the places that we've seen. They're just copies of each other, and more than that, we don’t know whether they’ll _last_."

"They've all been inspected," Peggy feels obligated to point out, poking a fork tine through a single pea rolling on the edge of her plate.

"I don't mean that they're going to fall to pieces tomorrow. But they haven’t been tested at all. In twenty years, in fifty, are they going to just be identical pasteboard wrecks? The place we buy is going to be where we live our lives. We're going to bring kids there, and maybe grandkids." He presses his hands together. "I want our home to be something _more_ , Peg."

She doesn't entirely understand - all of the houses had looked fine to her, decently built if modern, not exactly what she was accustomed to from England, and an older house certainly had its own likelihood of falling to pieces or becoming a nuisance to keep patched together - but she touches his hand, closing her fingers around his and squeezing.

"We can keep looking," she says, and she finds in his smile the strength she needs to make it true.

* * *

It's not a newspaper advertisement that finally leads them to the place, but Rita Langforth from down the street who mentions that her great-uncle and -aunt are selling their house to move where it's warmer. Peggy and Steve go to look the next afternoon.

"It’s a bit small, but we never really considered leaving. We moved in here the day after we were married, all the way back in ‘06," Anna Moss tells them as she takes them through each room, a fond sadness on her face as she looks about at everything. "Joe carried me over that threshold, and carried each of our babies out for baptism after they were born upstairs."

"She weighed about the same as the babies, though she was about a thousand times prettier," Joe Moss jokes in his craggy tenor and Anna blushes and says, "Don't lie to the children, Joey."

"Are you truly certain you can part with a place like this, with so many memories?" Peggy asks gently. Anna keeps touching the solid wood doorframes, and Joe has pointed out a half dozen spots with particular imperfections or stories in a way that Peggy understands to mean that he has several hundred more to share.

"Oh, it's getting to be a little too much for us," Joe says with peaceful regret.

"We'd like to pass it on to someone who will love it as much as we have," Anna adds earnestly. She peers at Peggy through her small eyeglasses. "I would be happy to give it to the two of you."

"Steve?" Peggy looks over to where he is standing in a shaft of sunlight, taking in the place with a slightly distant look in his eyes. Until he looks at her, and he focuses, and smiles.

"I can picture us here," he says. “Can’t you?”

And although she'll never admit it, she's happy he made them keep looking, because she can picture them here in a way she couldn't entirely in the other places they had seen. There it had been the vague shadow of a Steve chopping vegetables at the counter, or a version of herself taking advantage of the fireplace: images which were almost functional, as if she were posing paper dolls or extending a measuring tape to make sure that the two of them were the right size for the interior. But here it is a whole life she can see, a vivid array of board games and reading together in this parlor, a Christmas tree which will stand in that corner, of dancing in full view of the windows for no reason at all, waving to neighbors from the front porch, of children who will bicker over who has the bedroom with the window seat and challenge each other to climb the shade tree in the front yard.

Peggy turns to the Mosses and asks, "Where can we sign?"

* * *

Three weeks later they stand in the middle of their new front hallway. Their old loveseat is already in place, as are the kitchen table and chairs, and the new bed they bought. Otherwise they are accompanied only by three suitcases and five boxes. Neither of them has been particularly accustomed to permanency or the acquisition that comes with it.

“How in the world are we to fill this place?” Peggy asks, turning this way and that with hands on her hips.

Steve rests his hands on top of hers. He kisses her until she twines her fingers with his, then pulls back and looks at her so he can say, “We already have.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Domestic Bliss
> 
> Another fairly literal/"domicile" focused take on this prompt. And a somewhat direct response to the "Endgame finale was bad because Peggy and Steve were a postwar couple and would only want to live in a new construction modern home" argument. The response being "nah."
> 
> Wish there could have been more House Hunters jokes in here, but I am only ever period accurate.


End file.
